Archive for March 23, 2011

On March 16th, we’re holding an on-line forum to discuss MySQL on Windows – I’ll be handling the High Availability session (includes MySQL replication and MySQL Cluster). The event runs from 9 am Pacific Time until 12:00 pm; the HA session is schedules for 11:00 Pacific and runs for half an hour. I’ll also be answering questions on-line during the forum. As always the even is free but you need to register here.

Here is the official description…

Join our Online Forum and discover how you can win with MySQL on Windows. Oracle’s MySQL Vice President of Engineering Tomas Ulin will kick off a comprehensive agenda of presentations enabling you to better understand:

Why the world’s most popular open source database is extremely popular on Windows, both for enterprise users and ISVs

How MySQL fits into the Windows environment, and what are the upcoming milestones to make MySQL even better on the Microsoft platform

What are the visual tools at your disposal to effectively develop, deploy and manage MySQL applications on Windows

How you can deliver highly available business critical Windows based MySQL applications

Additionally, Oracle experts will be on live chat throughout the event to answer your toughest questions.

MySQL on Windows: It Just Keeps Getting Better!

Oracle’s MySQL Vice President of Engineering Tomas Ulin will kick off the Online Forum and review why MySQL has become highly popular on Windows for both enterprise users and ISVs, as well as Oracle’s MySQL on Windows Strategy. Senior Product Manager Rob Young will then help you understand how MySQL fits into your familiar Windows environment, covering MySQL Connectors, integration with Visual Studio, security aspects…and more. They will also review the improvements Oracle recently delivered as well as the upcoming milestones to make MySQL even better on Windows.

Are you wondering what visual tools are at your disposal to effectively develop, deploy and manage MySQL applications on Windows? Mike Zinner and Rob Young will show you how you can benefit from the following tools:

Databases play a key role in ensuring application availability, and MySQL offers a range of HA solutions on Windows. Senior Product Manager Andrew Morgan will in this session explore two of them:

MySQL Replication, which has been widely deployed by some of the leading web properties and in the enterprise to deliver highly available database services, providing a means of mirroring data across multiple hosts to withstand failures of individual systems.

MySQL Cluster combining 99.999% availability with the low TCO of an open source solution. With a distributed shared-nothing architecture and no single point of failure, MySQL Cluster can scale linearly to meet the unprecedented demands of the next generation web services & telecom applications.

Customer Story: SonicWall

SonicWALL provides network security and data protection solutions enabling to secure, control and scale global networks. Director of Product Management Jan Sijp will share with you how they have successfully delivered MySQL based solutions on both Windows & Linux, providing information about the challenges they were facing, why they selected MySQL over Microsoft SQL Server, and the implementation process.

There’s a Meetup on Tuesday evening for MySQL users in the London area. It’s hosted at the Canonical offices (27th floor of Millbank Tower) at 18:30. Likely to last for a couple of hours before we head to a local pub for more serious discussions.

These are pretty informal events – if you want to find out the latest news in the MySQL world or have something to say then please come along. I’m hoping to discuss the latest MySQL Cluster developments.

Find the details and register at the Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=134352579966946&ref=mf

We’re interested in finding out what NoSQL databases you might be using (and we include MySQL Cluster in that list when using one of its NoSQL interfaces such as the NDB API or ClusterJ).

To figure this out we’ve posted a quick poll on the home page of dev.mysql.com (go straight to the bottom-right corner of the page) – please take 30 seconds to complete it (it shouldn’t take any longer than that) if you can. In return, you can also see the latest results from the poll.

Once again, MySQL gets special treatment and has a dedicated track at this year’s Oracle OpenWorld (October 2-6 in San Francisco). If you think that you’d have something interesting to present (for example if you’re using MySQL in an interesting way) then why not submit a session – the call for papers is now open! Time’s a little tight to get your proposals in – the deadline is 27th March.

For those not familiar with Collaborate, it’s the big community conference for Oracle users – this year it’s in Orlando from April 10th through 14th (I’ve just checked the weather forecast, 29 Celsius vs. -18 at the last conference I presented at – OOW Beijing in December – what a difference 4 months and 8,000 miles make!).

Summary of Results:

We recently conducted a Performance Benchmark of the newly released version of MySQL Cluster database software version 7.0 using the DBT2 Benchmark. The results are very impressive.

Highlight of the results:

For 4 Node Cluster, we achieved 251,000 Transactions per minute which is more than 4X improvement over the MySQL Cluster 6.3 release.

For 2 Node Cluster, we achieved 143,000 Transactions per minute which is more than 4X improvement over the MySQL Cluster 6.3 release.

Whether a user is looking to take advantage of the latest multi-core, multi-thread server processors, or is seeking to reduce space and energy consumption of their Cluster hardware, MySQL Cluster 7.0 provides a higher throughput, more efficient solution than previous generations of the MySQL Cluster database.

Note that these results were obtained using 1GB Gigabit Ethernet. We expect improved performance for high speed cluster interconnect like InfiniBand and Dolphinics interconnect solutions. Testing using these interconnects is currently underway.

Some of the KEY features of MySQL cluster 7.0 include “ability to add nodes and node groups online” and “Data node multithreading support” You can look at the list of new feature available in MySQL cluster 7.0 here.

Deployment Architecture and Configuration Details:

The topology diagram for 2 Node Scenario

In the case of a 2 node scenario, the data node processes were running on TWO Sun Fire x4450 system with 8 processor cores per data node. The MySQL server nodes were running a combination of Sun Fire x4450 systems and Sun Fire x4600 systems as shown in the deployment diagram below.

The topology diagram for 4 Node Scenario

In the case of a 4 node scenario, FOUR x4450 system were used to deploy the Data Nodes, each data node using 8 cores. The MySQL Server nodes were running on a combination of TWO Sun Fire x4600, ONE Sun Fire x4240 and FOUR Sun Fire x4450 systems.(co-located with data node systems). Other relevant details are captured in the deployment topology diagram.

Detailed Results:

Four Data Node Results

Two Data Node Results

Important Notes:

Each MySQL server was bound to 3 processor cores using “processor set” feature(to accommodate more MySQL Servers on the available hardware). It is observed that we get increased TPM/MySQL Server and slight decrease in the response time with 4 processor cores per MySQL server). An example: With 3 processor cores assigned for the MySQL server process, we get the TPM of 12988 for 1 Server, 20 Warehouses. With 4 processor cores, the TPM increases to 19113 with decrease in the response time from 52ms to 34ms.

TPM – New-order transactions per minute. It should be noted that the each transaction comprises of about 30 queries, so average response time per query if calculated would be ~3ms. More details on the “transaction” are available in the TPC-C specification document and DBT2 code base.

The MySQL 6.3 Cluster saturate with fewer number of MySQL servers. For comparison purpose, we ran the tests with equal number of MySQL servers for both MySQL Cluster 6.3 and 7.0

Benchmark Description

Database Test 2 (DBT-2) : DBT2 is an open source benchmark developed by OSDL (Open Source Development Labs ). Significant updates to the benchmark were made to simplify its ability to run with a clustered database such as MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition. DBT2 simulates a typical OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) application that performs transactions with around ten to twenty SQL statements per transaction within five distinct transaction types. The DBT2 benchmark can be used as a good indicator in regards to the expected performance of any application that performs fairly simple transactions and executes these transactions in a repetitive fashion.

For the benchmark results above, DBT2 and MySQL Cluster were configured as an “in memory” database to simulate typical “real-time” database configurations. It should be noted that performance results are being measured as new-order transactions per minute (TPM). The changes made to the DBT2 benchmark are documented and can be found on the SourceForge page for DBT2 downloads. It can also be downloaded from ww.iclaustron.com.

Oracle University has added a new course to its training catalog “Introduction to MySQL 5.5” which is a day-long seminar. The seminar goes into some detail on many aspects of using MySQL and of course pays particular attention to the new features in MySQL 5.5. I’ve reviewed the material and can assure you that there is plenty of it!

Of most relevance to this blog is the overview of MySQL Cluster (which isn’t a big focus of the seminar as Cluster is currently using MySQL 5.1) and MySQL replication – the highest profile 5.5 feature being asynchronous replication which can make sure that zero updates are lost even if the master fails catastrophically.

At the time of writing, neither the on-line and instructor-led sessions have been scheduled and so you should register an interest here. When OU have sufficient registrants they’ll schedule the sessions (note that unlike webinars, white papers etc. there is a charge for this training).

Here’s the official description:

Introduction to MySQL 5.5

Duration: 1 Day

What you will learn

This one–day seminar covers all the new features and other key enhancements to MySQL 5.5 and the MySQL Enterprise Edition, including Performance, Scalability, Availability and Backups. Instructor lecture is supported by live demos as necessary. By attending this course, you learn how to plan your use of the MySQL 5.5 product release more effectively.

Students who can benefit from this course:

New users of MySQL, who have little or no previous experience with a relational database management system.

Existing MySQL users who are interested in learning about the new functionality possible with the MySQL 5.5 Release